Gerry Cohen
The season opens with the Bundys trapped in a traffic jam on the way back from a trip, going nowhere for the entire episode. Kelly has her diploma, Bud is a senior, and Marcy has her bank manager job back by a method she describes in detail. Almost all of it happens in one stationary car.
Al finds out Peg has spent years buying other people’s yard sale junk, so the family holds a sale of their own to get rid of it. Nobody comes. It is the season 4 finale, the last episode in which Peggy smokes, and the source of Al’s Bigger Idiot Theory of commerce.
Marcy falls asleep on the Bundy couch and Kelly talks her brother into lying down beside her, so that Marcy wakes convinced something happened. Al, who has been having nightmares about feet for a fortnight, is meanwhile recruited to judge a beauty pageant. Kelly engineered the entire thing and watches it land from the stairs.
Kelly needs an internship to graduate and ends up on local television as the weather girl, then as the station’s self-described meterlolologist. Al picks the same week to finally ask for a raise. One of them succeeds. The episode also contains one of the warmest scenes Peg and Kelly ever share.
Kelly is about to graduate, and Peg gets nostalgic enough to open her own yearbook, where she discovers that she never actually graduated herself. She failed home economics. Her solution is to enroll in the same class her daughter is currently taking, which goes about as well as that sounds.
Bud sets out to get even with the girl who humiliated him in sixth grade, played by Tiffani-Amber Thiessen a few months before Saved by the Bell made her famous. Al, meanwhile, has been asked to address the homecoming dance and uses the platform to warn teenagers off marriage entirely.
Al, Bud and Kelly fly to Las Vegas to retrieve Peg and Marcy, who lost everything at the tables and cannot get home. To raise the fare, Al is entered into a wrestling match against a professional. Peg’s objection is not that he is being beaten, but that the children are watching.
Steve walks out on Marcy to become a park ranger at Yosemite, and sues her for alimony on the way. Peggy’s remedy is to take her to Las Vegas. It is also the first episode where the studio audience applauds the cast walking onto the set.
The IRS comes after Al over a return Peg filled in, and he needs five thousand dollars in a hurry. The solution he lands on is selling his wife’s hair. Behind the scenes this was the last episode David Garrison taped as a regular, and the last the show filmed in the 1980s.
A rainstorm gets into the house and Al goes up on the roof to fix it, with the television antenna as his real priority. Katey Sagal has named it her favorite episode of the series, and it was nominated for an Emmy for its editing.